Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1150-1152

Growing up in a lefty, working class family, I felt it all the time. On the one hand, there’s this ideological imperative to validate work as virtue in itself. Which is constantly being reinforced by the larger society. On the other hand, there’s the reality that most work is obviously stupid, degrading, unnecessary, and the feeling that it is best avoided whenever possible. But it makes it very difficult to organize, as workers, against work.

SUNDAY, JUN 1, 2014

David Graeber: “Spotlight on the financial sector did make apparent just how bizarrely skewed our economy is in terms of who gets rewarded”

Salon

[emphasis JS]

The “market forces” are not physical phenomena; they are the hyenas and vultures from Wall Street who dismantle and then feed on the carcasses of a city or country. Decline does not just happen; it is engineered by the corporate entities of global capitalism  to maximize profit without regard for human costs. It is ultimately up to us, for the common good of human kind, to put wrenches  into the well-oiled wheels of this global corporate machine that is breaking our backs by grinding and crushing our accomplishments of more than 250 years to return us to the servitude of feudalism.

Gilbert Mercier

Back to the Dark Ages of Feudalism

JUNE 02, 2014

counterpunch

Without a clear strategic goal of a humanity freed from work through the gradual expansion of automation and the social wage, all policies short of Luddite bans on new technology will have disappointing and perverse effects. If liberals and the left do not re-embrace the end of work and the need to give everyone income as a right of citizenship, unconnected to employment, they will help usher in a much bleaker future of growing class polarization and widespread immiseration. If libertarians and the right do not adapt to the need to provide universal income in a jobless future they may help bring about a populist backlash against free trade and industrial modernization.

In other words, it’s time to make a choice: Luddism, barbarism or a universal basic income guarantee.

Embrace the End of Work

J. Hughes

IEET

[emphasis JS]